Whenever I start up PTW, the movies, mouse movement and the entire game in general becomes incredibly slow and choppy. This only occurs with PTW, not Civ III.
My specs are:
GeForce4 Ti 4800 SE
Athlon XP 2100+ 1.7 Ghz
512MB RAM
Creative SBLive Platnium

Nothing wrong with your specs, it seems. Do you have any programs running in the background? (like Antivirus, firewall, MSN, etc.).

Yes, WinBoost. Could that be the problem?

It's not impossible. Is there a way to disable that temporarily and test?

Nope, that didn't work. I uninstalled it and had the same results with PTW.

Ok, it was a longshot. Have you tried updating graphics card drivers and direct X?

I would definitely check the graphics card drivers. Nvidea-based cards, like GeForce, have been problematic with Civ3/PTW.

I have the 44.03 nVidia drivers. Do those not work well with PTW? If so, which drivers do work well and where can I get them?

Whether they work or not depends on a lot of things. When I installed Civ3, i had the latest Nvidia drivers installed, and couldn't get the game to work. I then 'rolled back' to a previous release of the drivers, and the game worked. Then a couple of months later, a new Civ3 patch was released (1.21f, I believe) and for the fun of it, I tried reinstalling the newest Nvidia drivers, and found that they suddenly worked. :crazyeye: